CURRENT MISSION Bike packing in the USA ABOUT ME After a long year and a half of gainful employment, planning, saving, cleanliness, hot showers and mind numbing routine it's time for us to get back to our gypsy crumbdog "authentic selves" - we're finally hitting the road again! And this time we're going back to the beginning and returning to our first ever cycle touring destination, the US of A, for more grimy, bumpy, wild single track/dirt road adventures!! After years of riding too heavy on traditional bike touring setups, this time we're going lighter and fatter - bikepacking rigs on Karate Monkeys with 3" of rubber between our long suffering biffens and the rocky, sandy singletrack of the Arizona Trail and the Colorado Trail. YEEEEEEWWW!!! Now, bring me that horizon! Previous bike touring trips: In 2010/11 my boyfriend and I pedalled 7500km through Canada, USA and Mexico on an amazing seven month bicycle tour. We started with the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route from Banff, Canada to Antelope Wells in New Mexico, then rode down the Pacific coast of Mexico when the trail ran out. It was an absolutely amazing experience and, although i had done a lot of travel on motorized transport before, on that trip I decided that 'self-propelled' is my favorite mode of travel. Then in 2013 we did a road trip around southern Africa for 6 months in a 4x4 named Bessie. It was an amazing experience and i'm glad we did it by car (bicycles aren't allowed in game parks for obvious reasons and being on safari was a major part of the trip), but after six lazy months sitting in a car we decided it was time for another bike tour. So we hopped on a plane and after a quick stop in Australia to visit family and pick up my bike we headed to the south island of New Zealand for the 2014 summer season. New Zealand was yet another amazing cycling experience full of jaw dropping vistas and amazing wilderness (as well as a heap of rain and sandflys!) with plenty of dirt roads and off-road cycle trails - our favourite kind of touring! We managed to cover 3000km in 3 months before the money ran out and we had to get jobs in Queenstown. For the next one in 2016 we decided to step it up a couple of notches - 14000km from Patagonia to Colombia, all in the Andes and almost all on dirt roads. It was just over a year of huge climbs and slow descents, high altitude, crappy food, interesting cultures and mind blowing mountain views. Real tough going, but an absolutely amazing, hugely rewarding experience. And the only one we managed to squeeze in 2017 was a quick 13 day, 1000km blast down the Munda Biddi - a bike specific trail running from our home town of Perth south to Albany. Was a breeze after the Andes with such modern comforts as trail markers, water tanks and purpose built hiker/biker huts! This member has marked themselves as not currently available for hosting, so their hosting information is not displayed. Expected return 2019-11-06 PHILOSOPHY Lifestyle over luxury